Food, Drink, and Plenty of Literary Dish

WESTCHESTER is a bookish place, especially if you’re a woman. “Spoken Interludes,” a literary event held Nov. 6 at Trinity Bar & Grill in Harrison, was notable for its gender split. Of the 70 or so people there who had paid $30 to eat penne and hear four writers, including Michael Korda and Susan Cheever, fewer than 10 were men — and two of them were behind the lectern.

“All my husband reads is about the Civil War,” said Sheryl Kraft, who had come from Wilton, Conn., with a friend. “He could tell you anything about the Civil War. And he’s not even Southern.”

“Oh, men,” said Janet Giewat of Somers. “They’re into the History Channel and that kind of thing. It’s because women are in all the book groups.”

DeLauné Michel, a novelist and close relation of other novelists (niece and cousin of Andre Dubus and his son), began “Spoken Interludes” in Los Angeles 11 years ago. After moving to Westchester in 2004 with her husband, Dan Fried, who runs a family-owned photography studio in Riverdale, she set up her salon in Harrison.

Michael Lally, a New Jersey poet, did not seem to be suffering from a surfeit of fame. He sat at the writers’ table and waited his turn at the lectern.

“I stopped publishing for about 15 years, because I was mad at the literary scene in New York,” he said. “Then I stopped doing drugs.”

One day, he said, a man stopped him on the street. “He said, ‘My brother’s a Vietnam vet and he loves you.’ I thought, I’m not writing for the New York literary scene. I’m writing for him.”

Mr. Lally said he attends readings whenever he is asked, mostly because they help him sell books. This is important, as he lives on Social Security and a pension from the Screen Actors Guild.

Jennifer Egan, author of three novels, most recently “The Keep,” said she does not love readings. “I used to have a public speaking fear. I went from taking the beta blocker to just carrying it with me. Now I feel just a little nervous.”

She was probably not reassured by the first reader, Susan Cheever, who told fascinating stories about the “genius cluster” surrounding Ralph Waldo Emerson in Concord, Mass. After Ms. Cheever read from her book, “American Bloomsbury,” a woman in the audience raised her hand.

“Thoreau may have lived the simple life,” she said. “but he sent his laundry to his mother.”

Ms. Cheever said that Walden Pond wasn’t as remote as we think it was. “It wasn’t like he ever meant to be a hermit. It was like his first apartment.”

The audience was most interested in one aspect of his life: his first love, a black woman named Bambi.

“What happened to Bambi?” somebody asked.

Mr. Lally shrugged. “We both got married three times.”

Ms. Egan explained that she owed her novel to two sources: Henry James’s “Turn of the Screw” and “Dark Shadows,” a soap opera she loved in her childhood. “The Keep” is her contemporary take on the Gothic sensibility.

“What I particularly loved was letting the Gothic remoteness collide with modern connectedness,” she said. Cellphones, she said, are like ghostly visits: instant communication with unseen beings.

“I’m not planning to publish this in an academic journal,” she said. “This is just ad hoc thinking from a novelist.”

Mr. Korda did not procrastinate, introduce or explain. He simply strode to the podium and began reading from “Ike: An American Hero.” He was the opposite of nervous. He enunciated, he echoed, he carried. He was the hero of the reading.

Mr. Korda, who ran Simon & Schuster Publishing for 40 years, and edited Richard Nixon and Jacqueline Susann, among many others, cast President Eisenhower as prescient, and possibly a liberal, “a brilliant first-rate mind which he did his best to hide.” The crowd loved it. A man who identified himself as a World War II veteran was visibly moved.

“You could run for president,” he told Mr. Korda.

After the reading, Mr. Korda reminisced about heroes and old friends.

“The only signed pictures on my desk are Churchill and Cher,” he said. During negotiations to write her autobiography (she ended up going with another editor), Cher and Mr. Korda became good friends.